


Gravity works slowly if you notice it at all

by maraudorable (violentthunder)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (thanks for the apt tag suggestion ao3), Attempt at Humor, Hope Lupin to the rescue, Humor, M/M, young adults trying to adult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:55:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21812530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentthunder/pseuds/maraudorable
Summary: What does a wizard do when they can’t use magic to get out of a situation? They panic, make questionable decisions, and call their mum. And maybe kiss their best friend at the end.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 41
Kudos: 239
Collections: RS Small Gifts 2019





	Gravity works slowly if you notice it at all

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Psychomanteum (SilentP)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentP/gifts).



> For [Psychomanteum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentP/pseuds/Psychomanteum). Hope this makes you smile!

Idling in the rare October sun that dressed his tiny bedroom in lovely shades of gold, Remus was savouring the remnants of his exquisite dream. The dream, featuring one of his best friends in a more than best-friendly scenario, had been making a recurring appearance in the last three years and, after the initial shock of self-discovery had passed, was something he’d come to anticipate with a sort of bittersweet excitement. When one wanted to be friends with Sirius Black, learning to take what one could get came with the territory; when one wanted something more, it became a survival skill.

Remus moved his hand down his torso languorously, following the pattern Sirius’s hand had taken in his dream just minutes prior. This had also been making a recurring appearance. Just when he was about to pull at the drawstrings of his pajama bottoms, he heard a loud thud and an even louder clank coming from the sitting room, then a splashing sound, and then...

“MOONY!”

He snatched his hand away as if burned. It took him an embarrassingly long moment to realise it was panic in Sirius’s voice and not disgust at finding his friend pulling one off after an explicit dream starring both of them as the main and only characters. Grabbing his wand from the bedside table, Remus jumped out of bed and ran out into the sitting room.

What he saw there was most likely going to haunt both his dreams and his nightmares for months to come. Sirius was standing in the kitchen area at the farther wall of the room, his t-shirt and boxers soaked through on the front. This was good—this was dream material. But, unfortunately, that’s where it ended. A red mark was blossoming on Sirius’s forehead with alarming speed. To the right of him was their sink, with a hole where the faucet should be, water gushing out of it at an angle and onto the floor. The faucet was lying nearby, looking innocent for all intents and purposes.

“Have you tried a spell?” Remus was surprised to hear his own voice sounding much higher than he expected. Surely all the years of living with the Marauders should’ve taught him to take these things in stride.

“Do you know a spell?” Sirius’s voice, on the other hand, and in contrast to his earlier cry, sounded too calm, almost detached. Remus briefly wondered if the faucet had perhaps hit him on the head a bit too hard.

“Right. Well...” He racked his brain for any spells that could do something even remotely helpful in this situation, but it seemed everything he had once known just escaped his head without even waving goodbye. _Rude._ For the first time in his life, he had absolutely no idea what to do. Judging by the silence interrupted only by the sloshing sound of water, Sirius, also for the first time in his life, had absolutely no idea what to say.

“Let’s try sealing it shut?” Remus suggested. He came up to the sink, careful not to get under the stream, and cast the spell, only for the water to burst through the seal with renewed vigour a moment later, splashing him all over in the process. He swore loudly.

Water was starting to accumulate on the floor, filling up the cracks in the old wood. Sirius was staring at it, transfixed, unmoving. Remus was on the verge of panic. Unnerved by the silence and lack of action from his usually more than assertive friend who had never before been lost for words nor deeds, he scrambled for something to say. “It really is rather warm for October, isn’t it?”

That seemed to work. Sirius finally tore his eyes away from the floor and gave him an incredulous look. _In for a penny, in for a pound,_ Remus thought and, as nonchalantly as he could muster, added, “Some lovely sunlight in my room this morning.”

Sirius made a sound somewhere between a nervous bark of laughter and a sob. Without saying a word, he turned on his heel and made a dart for their turntable, where he started pulling out his vinyl records from the shelf underneath. 

If there was any doubt in Remus’s mind about the severity of Sirius’s head trauma before, there was certainly none left now. 

“Really, Sirius? Now’s not the time to think about your vinyl collection!”

To Remus’s immense relief, Sirius’s power of speech had finally decided to grace them with its presence. “But it’s time for you to talk about the bloody weather? And anyway, aren’t you supposed to save your valuables during times like this? Half of these were your gifts, I’m not leaving them.”

Remus, who had already opened his mouth for a retort, successfully forgot whatever it was he wanted to say the second Sirius’s last sentence registered in his brain. Touched that Sirius considered his gifts to be among his most prized possessions, he wondered if there was more to it or if his lovesickness was clouding his judgement. _Maybe he fancies me back, maybe he even lo—_

“Wait, where’s Minnie?” Sirius asked, interrupting Remus’s ill-timed daydreaming session.

“I don’t know, in Hogwarts? Why are you—”

“The cat, you plonker, where’s our cat? Cats are scared of water, she must be terrified!”

“Oh my god,” Remus gasped and dashed for Sirius’s bedroom where Minnie was often sleeping. Sometimes he asked himself if he was ridiculous or just plain batty for being jealous of a cat.

Quickly scanning the bedroom that was not much bigger than his own, he immediately found her napping in a cat loaf position on the back of her usual armchair, blissfully unaware of what was happening on the other side of the door. The crochet quilt covering the chair had new snags where her claws pulled out the stitches, Remus noticed. He would have to ask his mum to fix it again. 

A thought struck him—a genius one, if he did say so himself—and, wondering why he didn’t think of it right away, he hurried back into the sitting room to share it with Sirius. “I’m going to call my mum!”

Sirius looked unimpressed. “Oh, sure, and then let’s pay James a visit, make a day out of it, why don’t we? Remus, you know I love Hope, but maybe you could postpone your weekly chat with your mum until we’ve dealt with the situation at hand?”

“First, I don’t exactly see you dealing with it”—at this Sirius had the decency to put his stack of records down on their wobbly coffee table—“and second, if we can’t stop it with magic, we’ll have to deal with it the muggle way, and my mum will know what to do,” Remus said, fingers already rotating the wheel dial of their landline that his mum had thankfully insisted on equipping their flat with.

Listening to the monotonous sound of the ringback tone, he let his eyes rest on Sirius, gaze lingering on his wet t-shirt. Somehow, seeing him like this, with the fabric almost see-through and clinging nicely to his chest and shoulders, was even better than seeing him shirtless. Not that he’d ever be opposed to that, either. He firmly kept his eyes above Sirius’s waist for fear of losing whatever little control he had of the situation had he moved them down to his wet boxers. Sirius, however, had no such inhibitions and was openly staring at Remus’s damp low-slung pajama bottoms, as Remus was shocked to discover when he lifted his eyes to look at his friend’s face.

“Hullo?” his mum’s melodic voice suddenly rang in his ear. Remus almost dropped the phone. So much for keeping the situation under control. 

“Er... Mum?”

“Everything alright, love?” Hope asked in a motherly tone. “You usually don’t ring me up until around tea.”

Remus felt relief wash over him in an instant, enveloping him in a comforting hug. His mum would know what to do. She always did.

“Yeah, it’s... Wait, no! There’s a problem with the faucet—well, not actually the faucet, it’s not even attached to the sink anymore—but there’s water everywhere and more and more is coming, and magic isn’t helping, and we don’t know what to do, and—”

“Do you know where the stop valve is?” she interrupted his half-incoherent blabbering.

They were supposed to know where the stop valve was? 

He repeated the question to Sirius, who, judging by his puzzled and mildly wondrous expression, seemed to have no idea what a stop valve even was. Remus wondered if there were any books for irresponsible first-time home owners like them. _‘First Time Living on Your Own? Here Are Some Things You Should Know by Now, You Utter Prat’_ or something like that. Maybe he would even read one.

Correctly interpreting their silence, Hope continued. “I see,” she said, not at all surprised that two nineteen-year-olds who had been taken care of their whole lives before that wouldn’t know such basic things. “It should be under your sink or in a cupboard nearby. Maybe in the bathroom. Turn it clockwise to close it. Not counterclockwise. Clockwise.”

“I know, I know—lefty loosey, righty tighty—I’m not daft, mum,” Remus muttered out of half-forgotten teenage habit before realising he wasn’t exactly in a position to be making such statements at the moment.

“Sure, love,” she humoured him. “Ring me back in five. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll Floo over, alright?”

Sirius, who must have heard what Hope had said, was already crouching under the sink. Remus hung up the phone and came up to stand behind him. He was only there to see if Sirius needed help, really, and if his eyes found their way to his friend’s bum sticking out in the air—well, that was on them.

“The blue one means cold, yeah?” Sirius asked, voice slightly muffled. “So do I just turn it?”

Half a grunt and two seconds later, the water stopped. Looking for all the world blasé, like he’d been doing such tasks all his life, Sirius emerged from under the sink, and had Remus not known him better than anyone else, he would’ve fallen for his feigned indifference. 

“Piece of cake,” Sirius said offhandedly.

“Oh, don’t look like you’ve known it all along—”

“Maybe I have!”

“—when you were practically planning your escape not five minutes ago. And with your whole vinyl collection, no less! Sirius Black, choosing flight over fight? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sirius said without malice, grinning at Remus. “‘It really is rather warm for October,’” he mimicked, not even trying to make a passable attempt at the Welsh accent, but making up for it by aligning his features into what he probably thought was a decent imitation of Remus’s expression. It really wasn’t.

The events of the last ten minutes finally catching up with him, Sirius started laughing, more nervous elation than anything. Remus felt high on exhilaration, relief-induced hysterics bubbling up in him, threatening to spill out like Butterbeer out of its glass. Without thinking, he grabbed Sirius by the collar of his shirt and kissed him.

He was ready for anything. He was ready for shock, confusion, polite rejection, not-so-polite rejection, anger, revulsion. What he wasn’t ready for was Sirius’s tongue in his mouth and his fingers digging into the soft part of the small of Remus’s back. _Oh, I’m still dreaming then,_ he thought resignedly, _there’s no way this is real._ He bit Sirius’s lower lip in despair.

“Ow, Moony!” Sirius gasped with mock indignation, breaking the kiss. “Didn’t expect you to get bitey on me during our first snog—could’ve at least saved it for our third.”

Remus was almost scared to breath, afraid he’d spook off whatever deity it was that decided today was his lucky day. “There’s going to be a third?”

“I certainly hope—”

“So do I, but could you boys postpone it a bit?” said a third voice, making Remus jump and let out an embarrassing yelp before he saw his mum getting out of the fireplace. “I’m not going to mop all that water by hand. And dry your clothes—it’s been unusually chilly for October.”


End file.
